Increasing the speed of your business with Decision Management

Everyone can agree that business agility – quickness and responsiveness – is essential for success. It means getting your products to market faster. It’s managing your current products and services more efficiently. It’s enabling your IT organization to change business policies fast, in near real time.

Operationalizing business changes has long been a barrier impacting responsiveness. The challenge lies in accessing and updating business rules that drive company operations. Once a change in business policy is triggered by market conditions, regulatory requirements or other factors, business rules coded within company systems must be updated.

Business rules contain the logic that underpin an organization’s operations and identity, like its DNA. Like a strand of DNA, business logic includes a long sequence of decisions. Logic is buried in program code, rules engines, spreadsheets and – most worrisome – in people’s heads.

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Typically, the IT organization is charged with making updates to business rules. But this daily activity can be a tedious, time-consuming process, with its own development cycle that includes coding, sometimes in a vendor’s proprietary language, and testing – all of which can add weeks or months to the project. Rules engines, designed to be managed by the IT department, have become a significant part of the problem. Complexity in business logic can overwhelm the capabilities of rules engines causing delays in time to market.

The answer is to separate the business logic from the underlying technology and manage it as a corporate asset. Extracting logic from its source and consolidating into decision models, enhances business agility, operational efficiency and opens new growth opportunities. These activities help describe the role of Decision Management in improving business operations. Specific benefits include:

• Direct access to business logic for faster updates – reducing update cycles from weeks to hours
• Revitalization of legacy systems by extracting logic to create a “light” back office capability that’s better performing and integrates more effectively with digital technologies
• Increased reuse of logic to improve efficiency and greater accuracy to enhance quality
• Technology agnostic approach that eliminates vendor lock-in
• Model logic that can be “owned” by the users who are closest to the business

Decision Management is not limited to any vertical, and there are compelling use cases across all industries. Regulation is a key driver of business policy changes with far reaching impacts. Other drivers include automating manual processes and optimizing workflows.

Digital transformation initiatives supporting multi-channel experiences for customers can benefit from the Decision Management solutions too. “Next best offer” experiences, enabled with responsive business logic, deepen customer relationships and open-up opportunities for profitable upselling and cross-selling.

Expect to hear more about Decision Management in the future as companies drive automation to the next level. Gartner recently recognized Decision Management solutions as an integral component of Hyperautomation, an approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. Decision Management’s role in streamlining the business for operational speed is gaining traction and becoming a differentiator.